Foundation Board Minutes for Tuesday, April 3rd 2018, 18:00 UTC

Next meeting date Tuesday, April 10th 2018, 18:00 UTC

Attending

  • Didier Roche
  • Allan Day
  • Cosimo Cecchi
  • Nuritzi Sanchez
  • Meg Ford
  • Carlos Soriano

  • Neil McGovern

  • Rosanna Yuen

Regrets

Missing

  • Alexandre Franke

Agenda

Any GitLab issues that require discussion or that have had significant updates should be put on the agenda.

Postponed:

Minutes

  • GNOME Asia 2018 update, proposal & budget approval (Nuritzi)

    • We've received accounts from last year's GNOME.Asia. (They made a small loss, but that's being covered by a sponsor.)
    • We received a proposal for GNOME.Asia 2018 last week, to be held in Taiwan, 11-12 August. It will be a joint event with COSCUP, which means that income and exenditure needs to be split. This might become a tricky question if we are funding more travel than COSCUP, but is probably something we can work out.
    • There's some uncertainty over what our expectations are for teams running their own bidding processes. It isn't clear whether the GNOME.Asia team know to follow the new conference guidelines.
    • VOTE: Approve the GNOME.Asia 2018 proposal, with the condition that the local team follow the Foundation's conference guidelines - PASSED UNANIMOUSLY
    • ACTION: Neil to inform the GNOME.Asia team, and ask for information about accomodation, travel, and the local team
    • Does the GNOME.Asia team need to be a committee? (They call themselves a committee, but they're not a committee of the board.)
      • Carlos - no, because the Foundation isn't devolving any powers to them.
      • Allan - a committee might be a way to formalise the relationship without giving extra powers.
      • Didier/Cosimo - but then does every group need to be a committee? Where does it stop?
      • Nuritzi - the power we're giving them is to run the bidding process.
      • Rosanna - it could be damaging to say that they can't call themselves a committee. Neil - they can call themselves a committee if they want - they're not calling themselves a committee of the board.
  • Bi-annual committee reports (Nuritzi)
    • Board elections are coming up so it would be good to catch up on this.
    • Didier's on the case with travel.
    • Carlos will take over as sponsorship liason, from Cosimo.

  • Employee Handbook & Records Retention Policy (Nuritzi)

    • https://wiki.gnome.org/FoundationBoardPrivate/Staff/EmployeeHandbook#Records_Retention_Policy

    • The employee handbook was created about 9 years ago, for insurance purposes. However, the handbook was never formally approved. The handbook is required for tax returns so it would be good to have it approved.
    • We had an email from Ekaterina Gerasimova asking if the handbook could be made public.
    • Neil - a lot of it needs to be reviewed and updated. If we make it public, this would be a good time to do it. However, it is standard practice is to keep employee handbooks private.

    • ACTION: Neil can do this. If he can't, we could think about hiring a lawyer to do it. Neil to follow up with Kat. (Tracked at https://gitlab.gnome.org/Community/Board/issues/43.)

  • Code of Conduct committee charter (Allan)
  • Marketing Committee charter (Nuritzi)
  • Fractal Hackfest Accommodation (Meg) (urgent)

    • This is a follow-up to the issue from last week (tracked at https://gitlab.gnome.org/Community/Board/issues/37). The hackfest organisers want to receive accommodation sponsorship funds in advance of the event, but the travel committee doesn't do pre-payment.

    • Meg sent a mail to the Travel Committee and to the hackfest organizers. No one has submitted a travel sponsorship application yet.
    • Meg has proposed that:
      • Attendees apply for travel sponsorship.
      • The travel committee provides the board with a list of who's approved and for how much.
      • The board approves pre-payment so Rosanna can forward the funds (taking the funds from the Travel Committee budget).
    • Cosimo agrees that this is the best way forward.
    • ACTION: Meg to email the Travel Committee and hackfest organizers with a status update. Didier to follow up with the Travel Committee to see if these processes can be standardised and/or improved in the future.

Notable Status Updates

FoundationBoard/Minutes/20180403 (last edited 2018-04-04 09:31:27 by AllanDay)